Conservatives look back to the future
A couple of former Liberal premiers are considered viable candidates for the federal Conservative leadership, so it’s safe to assume the party is open to all options, particularly those that line up to the centre of right.
These are the fantasy-fuelled, funfilled preliminaries that precede the serious business of finding someone to succeed Andrew Scheer – or, more accurately, to succeed where Andrew didn’t. Whimsey and wishful thinking will conjure leadership material from the barest thread.
There are some currents appearing – it’s early and they’re subject to change – that could shape the direction of the leadership and the party.
First, the Conservatives are looking to their past in search of their future. That’s natural, because the “names” in the party are already made, and the opposition to a minority government needs a ready-forprime-time leader, not a fresh-faced novice the electorate wants one campaign to measure for future consideration.
And second, the old red branch of the Tory tree – the limb Stephen Harper pruned to the nub but failed to amputate entirely – is showing signs of shrugging off its long-dormant state.
The names most often mentioned as future Tory prime ministerial material are either Harper-era cabinet ministers or former premiers who, while rusty in their own right, weren’t tarnished in the long, gloomy reign of Stephen-the-sour.
The return of Harper himself has been mentioned by a few folks who display no other discernible signs of delusion. Conservatives pining that pitiably for the past should note that Justin evoked Harper almost as frequently as he raised the spectre of Doug Ford while snatching victory away from the Tories just a couple of months ago.
Among Harper’s former ministers the early preference seems to be toward those who’d be considered leaning toward the more progressive flank of the party.
If there is an early favourite it’s Rona Ambrose because of her solid notices as interim leader between Harper’s 2015 departure and Scheer’s arrival in 2017. Ambrose is a free-market, Alberta libertarian with a heart. Conservative-to-thecore fiscally, Ambrose is at least a centrist on social issues, and that’s where a lot of Conservatives are looking. They bought the book that says Scheer’s social conservativism and climate ambiguity cost them the election.
Next to Ambrose, Nova Scotia’s Peter MacKay gets the most mentions despite his post-election musings about smelling seabirds hanging off the soon-to-beoutgoing leader. Remarks of that kind, and the comparison of Scheer’s campaign to a hapless hockey player who misses an empty net, can come back to haunt an aspiring leader. They haven’t hurt MacKay because a lot of Tories agree with his assessment.
Whatever Ambrose and MacKay decide will influence a number of other potential candidates. Frontrunners winnow the field. If one or both are out, the race opens to who-the-hell-is-that.
MPs who haven’t discouraged talk of a possible run include Erin O’Toole, Michelle Rempel, Michael Chong, Gerard Deltell and Pierre Poilievre. So, from the vaguely familiar to the cloyingly partisan.
There’s a declared candidate named Bryan Brulotte, who is an unelected Conservative organizer with roots that run back to Kim Campbell’s walk-through the prime minister’s office in 1993.
Former premiers in notional contention are Christy Clark of British Columbia and Quebec’s Jean Charest, the latter being more serious than the former. Charest’s a bona fide Progressive Conservative, one of only two to survive the 1993 federal election (the other was Elsie Wayne of Saint John). He led the federal PCs, such as they were, from ’93 to 1998, was recruited to lead Quebec’s Liberals and eventually became premier for a decade.
There are no provincial Conservative parties in either B.C. or Quebec, so the provincial Liberals are home to lots of federal Conservatives. New Brunswick’s Bernard Lord, another former premier
– a Conservative – is also getting some mentions.
Even with the field still wide open, it’s worth noting that Conservatives with a pinkish hue, and at least one good old-fashioned red Tory, figure more prominently in the preliminaries than do possible candidates from the more conservative core of the party’s base.
If you want to see a shift in ideology, there’s a hint of one, but there’s also a political calculation at play here.
With the west locked in for the foreseeable future, Conservatives want a leader who can bring them seats in Ontario and Quebec. That’s good news for Tories still aligned with the old “Progressive” tradition that Harper and company struck from the brand after he and MacKay agreed to the PC-Alliance merger in 2003.